Answers to Your Job Search Questions

The reason for job search group is to ask questions and get answers. There are many questions that are asked often. Answering all these questions in this blog could provide me with content for months. But there are two questions I want to answer here. One is about cover letters, and the other is about social media and hiring companies.

The first question concerns whether or not people should send cover letters. My answer is yes. There are three groups of human resource people. The first group always read cover letters along with the resume. The second group never read cover letters. The third group reads cover letters when they find something in the resume that causes them to read the cover letter.

This seems cut and dry; always, never, and sometimes. However, when you send your resume to a company, do you know what group the read belongs in? Probably not unless you know someone at the company that can tell you exactly what to do. I recommend sending a cover letter with every resume. Most of the time you are sending the resume electronically, you won’t cost you any more to send. If the receiver wants to read it, it’s there. They can ignore or toss it if they don’t want it.

The second question is about the job searchers and social media. Do they look at it and what will it do to my candidacy? Again, they answer is maybe. First of all, they probably won’t check into your digital presence unless you are a top candidate. With the many applications they receive, it would be too time consuming to investigate all.

To be on the safe side, look at your digital presence to see what it says about you. I recommend that you run searches to see what they will see about you. There are free online digital dirt finders and companies will search for you for a fee. I will share ways to search your digital dirt in a future post.

If you find things you don’t like, take steps to clean it up. I think the best way to do it is to flood the internet with positive information about you. A few good ways are to share your thoughts in LinkedIn groups. Respond to articles posted in high quality publications like the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Money, etc. Give book reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Comment in forums and blog posts.

While these steps will take time, you want to start cleaning up digital dirt now. To do that remove anything you can remove. Take down and/or untag yourself from questionable pictures. Leave groups that don’t promote you in a good light. And finally, tighten all your security settings.

I hope this post provides you with valuable information about questions that have been troubling you in your job search. Knowledge is power. The more you know, the better you can make decisions.